We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen

There’ve been a lot of high-profile band documentaries in the past few years (DiG!, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, I’m Trying to Break Your Heart, etc.), but director Tim Irwin’s We Jam Econo (2005) is different in that Irwin’s subject is the Minutemen,the greatest band in the history of the world. Founded in San Pedro in 1980 by boyhood friends D. Boon (guitar) and Mike Watt (bass), with George Hurley joining on drums, the Minutemen personified the DIY ethos of the Los Angeles hardcore-punk scene like few others while making monumental music in the process. Driven by instinct, Boon and Watt sliced and diced their way through an eclectic field of musical influences — Dylan, Funkadelic, Captain Beefheart, the Urinals, Wire — to craft hard-driven, politically engaged minimalist riffs that cut like a buzz saw and dazzled like a kaleidoscope. It was a unique sound that, championed by Los Angeles punk progenitors Black Flag (whose label, SST, released the Minutemen’s first albums), found a tenuous home among punk’s three-chord crunch bands. Cruising through San Pedro with Watt in the latter’s Ford Econoline van, Irwin tracks the iconoclastic trio’s rise from the funky working-class neighborhoods of the harbor city to the clubs of Hollywood, through to Boon’s tragic death in 1985. The long lineup of testimonial interviews is like a who’s who of those who made growing up in the Reagan era tolerable: Minor Threat front man Ian MacKaye, X’s John Doe, the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea, and rock critics Richard Meltzer and Byron Coley. Released by Plexifilm, this two-disc DVD includes video recordings of three complete Minutemen concerts from the early to mid-1980s, a plethora of deleted scenes and a 16-page booklet of filmmaker and liner notes.